Prophecy, Proselytizing and Profit: Adopting Christian Soldiers

by Mirah Riben / January 1st, 2010

Providing a home for an orphan, or a child whose parents are unable to care for him, is an act of kindness. It is the essence and goal of child adoption. As such it seems fitting for religious and spiritual leaders to encourage this humanitarian act and for the faithful and caring to feel called to come to the aid of unwanted children languishing in orphanages, even to support fundraising to help defray the costs of adoption which almost always moves children from lower to higher social economic standards and provides them advantages they would not otherwise have access to.

It is thus that international adoption was initiated as a rescue mission n the 1950s with strong Christian fundamentalist and particularly Lutheran undertones. In the 1960s and 70s it came to be seen as a progressive act of liberal solidarity while domestically, unwed mothers were convinced to hide the proof of their “sinful” sexuality by allowing their bastard children to be adopted. It is estimated that more than six million American mothers – mostly white and middle class – have been convinced to lose their children to adoption. Four million of those occurred between 1940 and 1970; two million during the 1960s alone.

Now there is a new push. In June 2009, the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest Protestant denomination in the United States and the second largest religious body, with 42,000 churches and 16 million adherents – adopted a resolution encouraging adoption. As noted on O Solo Mama, a blog by single adoptive parent, Jessica Pegis, “On Adoption and Orphan Care” urges churches and families to get involved with adoption in whatever way they can. An excerpt of the resolution states:

WHEREAS, Southern Baptists have articulated an unequivocal commitment to the sanctity of all human life, born and unborn; and

WHEREAS, Churches defined by the Great Commission must be concerned for the evangelism of children—including those who have no parents; and

WHEREAS, Upward of 150 million orphans now languish without families in orphanages, group homes, and placement systems in North America and around the world; and

WHEREAS, Our Father loves all of these children, and a great multitude of them will never otherwise hear the gospel of Jesus Christ; now, therefore, be it…

RESOLVED, That we call on each Southern Baptist family to pray for guidance as to whether God is calling them to adopt or foster a child or children; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we encourage our pastors and church leaders to preach and teach on God’s concern for orphans; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we commend churches and ministries that are equipping families to provide financial and other resources to those called to adopt, through grants, matching funds, or loans…

This new push for adoption satisfies several right wing fundamental Christian agendas. First, it provides more members of the flock. Secondly, it appeals to the rabid anti-abortionists with the false notion that somehow promoting and encouraging adoption reduces abortion. Both of these are very appealing to well-meaning parishioners. Additionally, it provides for a softer political appeal than being anti-gay. As The Dallas Morning News pointed out (July 24, 2007) “some conservative Christians say an intense focus on hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage has come at the expense of caring for needy children. And they’re doing something about it…. The push, still in its infancy, could help recast the image of conservative Christians, broaden the appeal of the church and, consequently, find homes for children.”

The blog of the Abba Fund states:

The greatest thing you can do to establish a culture of adoption/orphan care in your church is to be gripped by the reality that God has adopted us as His children. The church is God’s great trans-racial adoptive family. As the gospel takes root in our hearts and we recognize that adoption is central to the heart and mission of God it also becomes something we care about. We will naturally begin to reflect our vertical adoption in our horizontal efforts. This is the foundation for creating a culture that believes that every Christian is called to care for the fatherless in some way. Not everyone is called to adopt but everyone is called to do something. The question for each Christian and each church is not “Should I care for orphans?” The question is “How can I care for orphans?

The June 2009 Southern Baptist resolution on adoption was a direct follow up of the May 2007 three-day summit in Colorado Springs (as reported by Riben “Adoption And The Role Of The Religious Right” Nov, 2007).

According to the just-released Together for Adoption e-book (produced by Together for Adoption, an organization founded to ”equip churches and educate Christians theologically about orphan care and … adoption”): “Man did not invent adoption, God did! Adoption was in the mind of God before man even had a mind! Adoption was a vertical reality (i.e., God’s decision to adopt us) long before it ever had a horizontal expression (i.e., couples adopting children). Therefore, the reality of vertical adoption, should influence how we think about orphan care and horizontal adoption.” Note the same geometric language used by the Abba Fund.

Yet, these noble sounding goals may not be all they appear to be.

Fallacy Number One: Millions of Institutionalized Orphans

The resolution claims 150 million children in orphanages which is higher than the 143 million often quoted, a figure which is well documented to be grossly overestimated. According to UNICEF, UNAIDS and USAIDS nearly 90% of the children in orphanages worldwide are not orphans, but have at least one living parent, as was the case with both children adopted by Madonna. Families in impoverished nations often use institutionalized to obtain medical care for their children and to fill other temporary needs.

“It’s not really true,” says Alexandra Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, “that there are large numbers of infants with no homes who either will be in institutions or who need intercountry adoption.”

Fallacy Two: Rescuing Orphans

Numbers aside, it would be noble and God’s work to adopt if in fact adoption truly rescued “unwanted” children. The problem is that instead of finding homes for children who might benefit from a loving, caring family, adoption has become a mega-billion industry meeting a demand for babies. Older children, and 129,00 children in U.S. foster care, who are considered unadoptable—typically over the age of 8, racial minorities and some with disabilities—are left behind in the quest for healthy young babies. Alexandra Yuster, notes that increasing international adoptions has not reduced the numbers of children in institutions.

Riitta Högbacka, University of Helsinki, Finland, reporting on the global market for adoption finds that internationally, as well as domestically: “Demand is focused on quite a small group of under three-year-olds, where the number of potential parents far exceeds the supply of children.”

UNICEF estimates that 95% of the world’s orphans are over 5 years of age while nearly 90% percent of all adoptions in the U.S. are of children under the age of 5. The breakdown is 46% are under a year; 43% 1-4 years 8% 5-9 years; 3% over 9. In Guatemala 80% of children adopted from Guatemala in 2006 were under 1 year of age.1 ,2 In 2007, 98 percent of U.S. adoptions from Guatemala were babies who had never seen the inside of an institution were signed over directly to a private attorney who approved the international adoption—for a very considerable fee—without any review by a judge or social service agency.2

Increasing international adoptions has done nothing to reduce the number of children in institutions, according to UNICEF3 ,4 and according to many child rights experts, international adoption decreases domestic placement opportunities that would allow children to remain within their culture, as locals cannot compete financially with the fees paid by Westerners. In Mozambique, for instance, when funding ran out for institutions, 80% of children were able to be reunified with their families. UNICEF favors international adoption as a last resort to be used only after all measures of family preservation are exhausted first, and then domestic adoption is fully explored.

Program director of International Social Service, Chantal Saclier is responsible for the United Kingdom’s ISS Resource Centre on the Protection of Children in Adoption. Saclier finds that although inter-country adoption is intended to find stable homes for children who do not have the opportunity for a loving family environment, many of the children being adopted have a family that could have been preserved. Factors such as pressure from wealthy adoptive families, and the selfishness and greed of officials, have created a situation in which economically disadvantaged children are exploited and sold.5

Peter Dodds, author of Outer Search\Inner Journey: An Orphan and Adoptee’s Quest, asserts: “International adoption isn’t the answer to improving the overall plight of children in developing countries. Even the strongest supporters admit the movement of adoptees across international borders represents only a tiny fraction of the neglected, abused and abandoned children in these countries. And supporters of international adoption are quiet about the children who are not adopted and left behind.”

Jane Joeng Trenka author and co-founder of TRACK, Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea, says, “South Korea’s dependence on the international adoption program has stunted the growth of more appropriate government-funded social welfare programs, as well as delayed the social acceptance of single-parent families….International adoption is NOT the solution. Instead, the South Korean government must find its own solution by investing in sex education, supporting single parents and creating incentives for domestic adoption.”6

Jae Ran Kim, a South Korea-born and American-raised adoptee and social worker in the field of adoption and child welfare laments: “It is ethnocentric and arrogant to think that the United States has any business telling another country how they should manage the problem of orphaned, abandoned or relinquished children. We can’t even solve this problem within our own shores.”

Even the most well-meaning adopters are left with no way to distinguish reputable agencies from unethical baby brokers. David Smolin, who with his wife altruistically chose to add their family by adopting two girls from India and discovered to his horror that they had been stolen from their mother. Smolin has become the leading authority on child trafficking fro adoption, coining the phrase “child laundering” to explain the hands these children are passed through so that the end agency in the West may be totally unaware that papers have been forged and DNA tests results phonied. Others, such as Julia Rollings and the Hemsleys have also become outspoken after unwittingly becoming the recipients of adopted children who were kidnapped from Guatemala or stolen from China.

Cultural Genocide?

Despite the material advantages children redistributed by adoption, some remain critical, including the National Association of Black Social Workers, which has called taking children from their ethic heritage, cultural genocide. Tobias Hübinette was born Lee Sam-dol in Korea. Adopted by Swedes, Hubinette, earned a PhD in Korean Studies in the Department of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University, Sweden in 2005.

Along the way, he earned a BS in Irish Studies at the Division of Celtic Studies, Uppsala University. Hübinette notes that “[b]oth the slaves and the adoptees are separated from their parents, siblings, relatives and significant others at an early age, stripped of their original cultures and languages, reborn at harbours and airports, Christianized, re-baptized; both assume the name of their master/parent and, in the end, only retain a racialised, non-white body that has been branded or given a case number. … These children were objects of rescue fantasies and relief projects for the European homeland populations and especially feminist and Christian philanthropist and humanist groups.”7

If this sounds extreme, consider this excerpt from Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches by Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky who believes “God is calling the people of Christ to see the face of Jesus in the faces of orphans in North America and around the world.” Moore, who likewise believes that “every one of us who follows Christ was adopted into an already existing family,” writes about his own adoption:

It didn’t matter to us that the nurses in the orphanage across the seas still called these boys “Maxim” and “Sergei”; we had on their walls nameplates reading “Benjamin” and “Timothy.” It didn’t matter what their current birth certificates read; they would soon be Moores.

This newness of identity also informed the way we responded to questions, whether from social workers or friends, about whether we planned to “teach the children about their cultural heritage.” We assured everyone we would, and we have.

Now, what most people meant by this question is whether we would teach our boys Russian folk-tales and Russian songs, observing Russian holidays, and so forth. But as we see it, that’s not their heritage anymore [O: Yes, this guy believes adoption changes heritage], and we hardly want to signal to them that they are strangers and aliens, even welcome ones, in our home.

“We teach them about their heritage, but their heritage as Mississippians. They learn about their great-grandfather, the faithful Baptist pastor, about their countrymen before them in the Confederate army and the civil rights movement. They wouldn’t know “Peter and the Wolf” if they heard it, but they do know Charley Pride and Hank Williams and “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” They are Moores now, with all that entails.

Another Christian family blogs that they “have the advantage of understanding our host culture’s worldview and their very deep superstitious beliefs. Thus, we were not surprised that Sterling [their adopted son] was given to us with a jade luck charm—a Buddhist charm meant to bring good luck, fortune and protection. We, however, know that this charm is associated with spiritual forces meant to keep people in bondage. Thus, we smiled and accepted it as we should, and then later went to the park, broke it, and threw it into the pond, and prayed for our sterling that all spiritual bondage over him would be broken. These spiritual forces are alive and real, and manifest themselves in more obvious ways (but with the same degree of power) than in the west, but we know that the power and grace of the God who created the heavens and the earth is infinitely greater than the forces of evil.”

Who Proliferates These Myths?

Within the evangelical movement, some of the many organizations promoting this agenda, as researched by Jessica Pegis and revealed on her O Solo Mama blog, are:

Abba Fund, which provides financial assistance in the form of interest-free loans for good Christian moms and dads to adopt.

Christian Alliance for Orphans, an umbrella group of organizations that fundraise and “equip churches as they grow effective orphan care, foster youth and adoption ministries” via annual summits that instruct how to start church-based orphan ministries, create adoption support funds, network with other churches, and so forth.
Cry of the Orphan Campaign, sponsored by Hope for Orphans and Focus on the Family. Together with the Christian Alliance, they promote many events, including those associated with Orphan Sunday.

Orphan Care, an initiative was launched in 2006 by Focus on the Family, the campaign name is trademarked and the emphasis is kids in foster care. From the website: “The Orphan Care Initiative is designed to inspire, equip, and engage the body of Christ along with and through the Church to bring orphans into a Christ-centered family structure.”

Orphan Sunday, started by an American doing mission work in Zambia witnessed an event aimed at helping AIDS orphans and went on to launch Orphan Sunday, first in Zambia and then in North America.

Pegis further notes that the very first Orphan Sunday in North America emphasized prayer, donations, and youth projects, i.e., keeping kids in their communities. Today, however, permanent separation of children from their communities seems to take precedence over other forms of help. Church members who don’t find themselves “called to adopt” are directed to support those who are.

Together for Adoption holds conferences that explore the theological links to adoption.

Following his Aug 2008 appeal to both presidential candidates, Rick Warren, Focus on the Family, and Campus Crusade for Christ talked about Christians devoting more resources to adoption, fostering, and care of children in need around the world. The theme was “You Are God’s Plan for the Orphan.”

In an oped for the Wall Street Journal (Aug 29, 2008), Kelly Rosati, who oversees Focus on the Family’s adoption and orphan-care division and is the mother of four adopted children said the 2008 theme represented a shift from the traditional way of viewing adoption as “something you considered if you were facing infertility” to a “commitment to adoption is part of a holistic sanctity-of-human-life ethic.”

The Los Angeles Times reported:

Over the next six months, Christian media will be saturated with stories and ads touting adoption and foster care as a scriptural imperative, an order direct from God. Tens of thousands of pastors will be urged to preach about the issue, set up support groups for couples considering taking in troubled kids, and even invite state child-welfare officials to talk to their congregations….

Several speakers [at the Colorado Springs Summit] talked of an urgent need to settle children in Christian homes that have “both a mommy and a daddy” — an implicit rebuke of same-sex parenting. Others suggested Christians could bolster their case for protecting the “pre-born” by proving that their concern for the child extends beyond the womb.

Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, a major player in this new path of evangelism, expressed at the 2007 summit a concern that foster parents typically are permitted to take children to church but cannot force religion on them. They must adhere to other state guidelines as well, some of which may contradict their faith such as parents “disciplining” their children physically with switches as taught by Dobson, a child psychologist.

While some of the flock may in fact adopt children from foster care, concern for orphaned and abandoned children is used as a smoke screen to use adoption as a tool against abortion, against single parenthood, and for evangelism. That is why, among those present at the 2007 event (and likely the follow-ups as well) was Tom Atwood, president of the National Committee for Adoption, the largest lobbying organization and marketing arm of adoption agencies, primarily those of the Later Day Saints.

The NCFA web page purports to be about finding homes for children in foster care, yet their mission page shows in black and white their first and foremost agenda item: “Train pregnancy counselors and health care workers in infant adoption awareness, so women and teens with unplanned pregnancies can freely consider the loving option of adoption.” Contrary to promoting the adoption of U.S. orphans, on the NCFA agenda is “Work[ing] with the U.S. and foreign governments to establish sound policies for inter-country adoption, so foreign orphans can be placed with loving, permanent families.”

The NCFA and the religious right are partners in a full-fledged propaganda war being waged to recruit Christian soldiers through adoption. With all the ingenuity and marketing skills available to them, the NCFA and the religious right couch their pro-adoption stance as a noble plan to help orphans and children in foster care, using these kids as the foot in the door by both to get tax incentives and other benefits for their clients who seek to adopt primarily infants. All good social engineers know the advantages of starting with a “blank slate.”8

Conflicts and Controversy

Conservative Christians do not accept medical infertility intervention, they also do not accept being childless as God’s will.

Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull, notes:

Spiritual warfare in the most basic sense is how a Christian engages with the culture by bringing this Christian influence, and knowing that they are there to convert the world and not become more of the world. Spiritual warfare can mean a lot of things, but in terms of using children, and viewing your fertility as a weapon of spiritual warfare — that is particular to Quiverfull, I think, or people who follow Quiverfull convictions without using their name, which a lot of people do. Spiritual warfare is about using all of your gifts in a Christian mission against the world.9

The basis of the Quiverfull belief is found in Psalms 127 A Song of Ascents. Of Solomon, the second half of the first states:

Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them;
They shall not be ashamed,
But shall speak with their enemies in the gate.

Despite the belief that “children are a heritage from the Lord,” and a “reward” which should not cause shame, justifications are found to shame some mothers – such as those who are not legally married – and to disregard the heritage of those who are adopted.

Additionally Joyce believes that “there’s a very strong racial undercurrent, when they talk about demography as a crisis, or under population, or declining fertility rates as a crisis, because they’re talking about declining white fertility rates, not declining worldwide fertility rates. I think there are a lot of ties and connections between the extremist members of this movement and traditionally conservative and racist groups in the South. I don’t think that’s necessarily part of the theological basis for it, though.” Adoption of course allows them to reach this goal despite their fertility or inability to become parents naturally.

Not all Christians interpret the bible similarly in regard to adoption. W. E. Vine, English Biblical scholar and theologian wrote The Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (1985). In it, he finds: “‘Adoption of children’ is a mistranslation and misleading. God does not ‘adopt’ believers as children; they are begotten as such by His Holy Spirit through faith.”

The United Church of God agrees that adoption is “a wonderful and noble act to provide a home and family to one who needs it—and it is typically a great blessing to both the adoptive parents and the child.” “Adoption or Sonship?” from the UCG booklet What is Your Destiny? found problems however “in applying the terminology of adoption to our relationship with God.” It goes onto state:

In human adoption, the adopted children are human just as much as the new parents—yet only because the children were adopted from other human parents who physically begot them. But if God merely adopted us and did not truly beget us in His image, we would be different kinds of beings from Him altogether—as He would not be adopting us from others like Himself. It could be likened in some sense to adopting a pet as a family member (albeit one that could talk).

Sadly, this is close to what many envision—that we are and forever will be totally different, lesser kinds of beings than God. And so they have no problem with taking the Greek word in question in the verses we’ve seen to mean adoption. But this notion of God’s purpose for us is not the truth, as Scripture makes clear that God actually begets us spiritually in His own image—with the intention that we ultimately become the same kind of beings He and Jesus Christ now are.

Conclusion

The Christian push for adoption as a calling from God falls short in same way that U.S. tax benefits for those adopting does. Both fail the very children they purport to help by not limiting their assistance to the adoption of the 129,000 children in foster care who could be adopted but instead use them as pawns to support all adoption as if they were all equal.

In the privatized multi-billion dollar unregulated adoption industry, it is impossible to distinguish ethical reputable agencies from those who may take babies from orphanages overseas who have – knowingly or not –who were stolen, kidnapped or coerced from parents who wanted them. We cannot as responsible citizens or Christians simply support adoption across the board when many are corrupt. We cannot as responsible citizens or Christians ignore the calling to help families in crisis find the resources they need to remain together before assisting in their destruction. And when adoption is the final recourse, we need not destroy the lines of heritage and eradicate part of a human beings identity. The more loving, caring thing is to honor and love all of the child, including his roots. Isn’t that what Jesus would have us do?

There is no doubt that adoption is beneficial for many children who have no families able to care for them. However, there are many other ways to help children in need and allow them to remain within their families, communities maintaining their ethnicity, names and heritage. Organizations such as SOS Village and Save the Children do just that. Conversely, taking children one at a time does nothing to ameliorate the poverty of their family, their village or their nation.

Adoption is intended to put the needs of children in need first. Adoption is not intended to objectify children to meet a demand for the childless or to increase any population or obtain followers to any religion or belief system.

Jennifer Banks, Note, The U.S. Market for Guatemalan Children: Suggestions for Slowing Down the Rapid Growth of Illegal Practices Plaguing International Child Adoption, 28 Suffolk Transnat’l L. Rev. 31, 40 (2004) (stating that, “[i]nternational adoptions comprise ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of all adoptions of Guatemalan children and virtually all of these adoptions take place through an extrajudicial notary system”). [↩] [↩]

11 comments on this article so far ...

Christian churches in the West have a funny history of compassion. During the genocide of Natives in Americana and Australia – churches were part of the invading western armies. Sometimes they used to give fifteen minutes to the villagers to convert to Christianity or face the massacre by the army.

What kind of sick mentality these people have? First they fund and support the destruction of a peaceful country, create hundreds of thousand of orphans in Asia, Middle East and Africa – and they pay for the adoption of some of those orphans to collect more sheep for the next slaughter of innocents in the name of religion.

I myself have sponsored five Bosnian Muslim children made orphans by the Christian Serbs and Croats.

That is a really disgusting viewpoint contained in “Adopted for Life.” Whether consciously or not, a child’s body will contain memories of those early experiences of separation and international travel; taking such an ignorant, fallacious, insulting approach to adopting a child from another country should not be allowed. And yet I’ve often seen people attacking adults adopted as children for criticizing the repugnance of their “parents,” shaming them that “someone took you in and fed you, so how dare you say that?” These christians are definitely sick.

This article totally misrepresents what is contained in the Bible. Jesus called us to prevent marriage between people that love each other, and talked ALL THE TIME about how bad abortion was. But this article seems to imply that Jesus was more interested in “compassion” and “kindness”. Jesus wants us to destroy other people’s culture, even if we have to kidnap their children to do it!

Excellent article. Well done. The idea of “Christian children” is an interesting one. No one ever talks about Democrat children or Republican children – we don’t allow children to vote because we understand that they don’t have the maturity and intellectual capacity to make political choices. They also don’t have the maturity and intellectual capacity to make religious choices. There is no such thing as ‘a Christian child’. There is only a child of Christian parents.

Thankfully, many people do recognize the innate intelligence and rights of children, and see that indeed, they should have democratic say–in their schools, in their home, in their life; even to the extent of lowering the voting age to at least six. Voting is quite different from religious indoctrination.

Thank you for your article elucidating the evangelical push for adoption and its ramifications in supply countries. I would like to point out something on the purely linguistic level that might be interesting to you and your readers. I returned to my birth country of Lebanon six years ago, and have been researching my adoption through a Catholic charitable organization since then. It quickly became obvious to me that the Arabic word I use for adoption–mutabanna–only has currency within a certain class of the population. Further study reveals it to be a back-formation from the Anglo-Saxon concept; loosely and literally translated, it might be something like: “permanently en-son-ed/en-daughter-ed”. That is has no natural Arabic root leads me to believe that the translations of the Bible–relying as they do on an already faulty translation from another secondary language–do not do justice to the original Aramaic, which, being a Semitic language of this region and of this culture, has no concept of nuclear family, or anything outside of what is a given here: extended family and communal solidarity.

It thus becomes disturbing the lengths to which current interpreters of the Bible twist the language and the stories to suit their purposes, similar to its use to justify slavery, and the divine right of kings previously. The Qur’an becomes rather enlightening in this regard, given its outright invocation that orphans, representing the most vulnerable members of society, be taken care of; that they remain within their community; that their filiation remain intact. The stories of the prophets Joseph and Moses (pbut) reveal this in terms of how their re-unification with their birth families is a central focus of both stories. Furthermore, all invocations concerning the “fatherless” in the Bible also contain within the same passages a call to care for widows and others who are unable to sustain themselves. Would not a logical conclusion of this be that the expectant mother be afforded this same zealous care and protection? That the orphan should be singled out from a given community, both literally in terms of the Bible and on the ground, only reveals the moral bankruptcy of putative Christians whose primary concern is, in fact, their own nuclear family as well as the conversion of the heathen multitudes.

This is nowhere more clear than here in Lebanon, where baby trafficking from the south and Palestine is starting to come to light. By my observations into paperwork in my orphanage, I can safely say that a full 40 to 50 percent of infants circulating through my orphanage were from Muslim families. Furthermore, statements made by those working there lead me to believe that the disdain for the religion of these children and their families is a prime motivator in their being targeted for adoption/conversion. This brings us back to the originating efforts of those such as Pearl S. Buck who see the world through this particularly noisome lens of colonialism, conversion, oppression, and non-relativism. Given that this same Anglo-Saxon culture has done nothing to alleviate poverty, racism, classism, and mono-culturalism on the home front, why should anyone believe that they truly desire to improve conditions elsewhere in the world?

Hmmmm. Might I suggest this isn’t quite as exclusive as is proclaimed?

The former people, Buddhists and Hindus who lived for thousands of years in what are now Islamic lands such as Afghanistan and Iran are certainly aware of the Qur’an and its enlightened servants so eager to convert them.
These (formerly) indigenous peoples were indeed liberated. Liberated of their land, religion and in millions of cases, their lives.

Do, or will Muslims ever acknowledge this without hysterically interjecting the very same excuses, justifications and even denials made by the Christians and Jews?

The “idolotors”/”pagans” seem to be a sticking point for all three of the extended family desert religions and their spiritually liberating theologies.

In all of the Christian pro-adoption literature I’ve read, they point to James 1:27 as a motivating call, which says “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Is adoption of international infants the only thing the bible is calling a Christian to do? Certainly not. But the church organization and leaders are not only calling for that either. You fail to mention that the focus on adoption almost always is accompanied by a boost in local efforts to support single parents, to assist children with parents in prison, and to care for local senior citizens both physically and emotionally.

You seem to have an agenda and only choose information that supports your narrow viewpoint. Where is your reporting on the Christian ministries growing in many cities to support foster parents and foster-to-adopt programs? How about some reporting on state and local groups turning to churches for support because other social service NGO’s are shutting down? Why don’t you mention the fact that donations to child-relief charities in the US are way down in 2009?

On the international front, your research is disappointingly narrow as well. Where are your notes on how US adoption from Guatemala was shut down because of irregularities in the adoptions? Where is your reporting on recent work by China and Korea to crack down on child trafficking including executing a former adoption official? You claim that the “industry” is “unregulated” but most international adoptions into the US since July 2009 follow the rules of the Hague Convention, which strictly documents and regulates every step of the process.

Finally, you missed an obvious point. Where is the commentary about how few Christian children continue in the faith after high school? Research within Christian groups shows that ministering to middle-school aged and high-school aged children is what is most lacking today in keeping people in the faith. If Christians were really “adopting Christian soldiers” as you say, they would be focusing on adopting older children. You claim that they are focusing on adopting infants to grow their numbers which, given the facts, does not make sense.

If your agenda was to make Christians look dangerous because they may not have all the facts in their desire to help children, then you did a great job. If your goal was to speak in defense of the children, I think you failed.

It is fallacious in terms of argument to point to the historical past as if this a) justifies current practice and b) makes the discussion “50-50″. Given the current hegemony of the a given economical and political model in the world today, the dominant and resistant discourses are not equal, and cannot be described as being so.

I would point to both Islamic and Christian liberation theologies as being trends that agree withwhat I is stated here and advocate the kind of grassroots change that would obviate adoption as we currently know it. But like all resistance movements, they are targeted for destruction by those holding power, of all religions.

The work in Guatemala and Korea to end adoption is being led by adoptees like myself who have returned to their lands of birth, working locally with advocates for grassroots change. We are hugely outnumbered by advocacy groups who are given the shelter of complete support by dominant legal, social, medical, cultural, and media modes of control.

To point out this controlling structure, as this article does, is half of this human rights battle. And you can choose which side you fall on.

“The work in Guatemala and Korea to end adoption is being led by adoptees like myself who have returned to their lands of birth, working locally with advocates for grassroots change.”

And within the U.S. the work is mostly being done by mothers who have lost children to adoption, speaking out against the exploitation, corruption, commodification of children in a supply and demand industry.

Russ, I wrote facts about the Christian right’s push to promote adoption. Facts that you do not dispute. Are there good Christians doing the righteous work of Jesus? Yes! One dear Christian missionary friend runs Amor del Ninos children’s home in Guatemala and totally agrees with me. Another friend is building houses, also in Guatemala because that is what he was called to do.

Fools use broad brushes and make generalizations about all people of one faith as if within ANY faith all people thought or acted the same way. I made no such generalizations. I have written here of fundamentalists and the pro-adoption programs they have initiated. I have quoted accurately and provided references.

Sadly, the fact is that adoption is very much on their agenda and is being preached to the masses, many of whom do not understand the realities and believe that adoption always rescues “unwanted” “orphans.” That too is too believe far too simple a broad brush generalization!

before anyone considers adopting or supporting other in that pursuit they need to become educated and separate the dogma and rhetoric being perpetrated by the profiteers of adoption from the truth of those sincerely trying to help mothers and their children. Throw out the money lenders and the baby sellers who speak with forked tongues and pretend to be helping children when all they are helping is their own bottom line.

Become educated about the truth of child trafficking. It is shocking! Read the works of David Smolin, another good Christian man and colleague of mine who tried to do a good, kind and caring thing through adoption only to find himself and his wife the recipients of two girls stolen form their mother in India. They are not alone. Google Julia Rollings’ adoption story. Good Christian people are being duped, sir!

So please, before you just disregard what I have written because it is shocking news to you – and horrible truths you do not wish to believe – please research the facts for yourself.